Yale senior Liana Schmitter-Emerson was recently awarded a one-year fellowship from the James C. Gaither Junior Fellows program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The prestigious program offers work experience to students interested in pursuing careers in international affairs.
Schmitter-Emerson is one of just 16 graduating seniors or recent graduates from universities across the U.S. to be accepted into the incoming class of Junior Fellows. The program allows fellows to spend one year in Washington, D.C., where they will work alongside Carnegie senior scholars in critical global fields, including democracy, conflict, and governance; international security and political economy; and sustainability, climate, and geopolitics.
At Yale, Schmitter-Emerson majored in History, with a focus on Germany and Eastern Europe. Her academic interests center on democracy, international relations, and 20th-century political theory, and she recently completed a senior thesis on postwar German legal reform and shifting conceptions of moral responsibility after the Holocaust. She has also worked as a research assistant at the Institute for Social and Policy Studies at Yale and served as a student liaison with the Maurice R. Greenberg World Fellows Program. She has also volunteered as a literacy tutor for New Haven public school students.
Professionally, she is particularly interested in American foreign policy in an era of renewed great power competition and the role of digital technology in shaping political advertising and democratic participation. She has held policy research roles at Who Targets Me, a UK-based NGO, where she investigated digital microtargeting in European elections, and at Cornerstone Government Affairs, where she focused on U.S. policy related to artificial intelligence and education. As a Gaither Junior Fellow, she will join the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace this fall.
